Barely 24 hours after President Obama signed his landmark health law, Gov. Martin O’Malley promised that Maryland would “lead the nation” in putting it in place. In the three years since, Maryland has been at the forefront of implementing the Affordable Care Act. It established six policy work groups. It trained more than 5,000 people to help consumers enroll in new health-coverage options. When its online insurance exchange passed a critical test in the summer — one of the first in the country to do so — a top official gave an emotional speech thanking workers. If any state was...

I’m avoiding overtly ideological comments as much as possible so as to stick with people who appear to have been frustrated trying to use the system in bona fide attempts to buy health insurance. I pulled all of these on Friday afternoon — you’ll notice that some are from earlier, but the more recent ones suggest the errors continue without interruption:

It may seem like a clever idea to save yourself cash by not purchasing health insurance, but with Obamacare kicking in, you’ll have penalties to pay, which could cost you big bucks in the long run. Not only are you playing financial Russian roulette – you could be forking out tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars if you’re injured in an accident or become seriously ill – you’ll also have to pay a penalty to the federal government for flouting the law, costing you hundreds or thousands of dollars more. A wiser decision if you’re uninsured is...

sample "As an unemployed 52 year old female, how will I get money to pay for this garbage if I can't get work? So then I am going to face a penalty? Guess what! I won't be able to pay that either. This is just the biggest illegal bunch of crap I have ever seen."

Once people start checking out the health-insurance policies available under the Affordable Care Act, they may be in for two big surprises. The first may come as they realize how many choices they have: People in Orange, Lake and Osceola counties can pick from up to 98 different plans, from four companies each offering multiple levels of coverage. Seminole offers 158. "You hit the button, and 80 or 90 or 100 plans jump out, and you have no idea what to do," said Don Kirkendall of AffordableOne Insurance in Winter Park. The second will come from the retail price —...

On Thursday, the government's official Obamacare Facebook page was riddled with people expressing sticker shock over the government's high cost premiums after struggling for hours to wade through the technical failures vexing Obamacare exchanges all across the country. "I am so disappointed," wrote one woman. "These prices are outrageous and there are huge deductibles. No one can afford this!" The comment received 169 "likes." "There is NO WAY I can afford it," said one commenter after using the Kaiser Subsidy Calculator. "Heck right now I couldn't afford an extra 10$ [sic] a month...and oh apparently I make to [sic] much...

Today, Obamacare’s October 1 launch date finally arrived. Ever since its passage, supporters of the law have made countless attempts to convince the American people of its viability, dismissing predictions of lost jobs, decreased hours, and rising costs, among others. Yet from major corporations to local mom-and-pop shops, from entire states to tiny school districts, a wide range of companies and institutions have seen Obamacare’s negative impact on their workers, budgets, and production. Here are 100 examples of how Obamacare is falling short of what was promised.

American media outlets were finally able to track down a mythical creature — a person who actually signed up for the Obamacare exchanges online. But that person, Chad Henderson, admitted to the Washington Post that the premium for the plan he enrolled in was $175. Ouch! Wasn’t Obamacare supposed to lower premiums? Henderson’s going to pay a $175 premium and he won’t even receive vision or dental insurance. He has contacts, so not having vision insurance is kind of a bum deal. Henderson, as far as we know a healthy, 21-year-old college student at Chattanooga State Community College who lives...

The New York Times, in one more effort to paint the Southern states as hotbeds of racism, estimates that two-thirds of poor blacks and single mothers will be denied health insurance under Obamacare because the Southern states refuse to expand their Medicaid programs. The Times adds that more than half of low-wage workers without insurance won’t get any, either. Well down in the Times piece is this nugget: more than half of states in the United States have rejected Medicaid expansion, including Ohio, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin, which are hardly Southern. To make the charge of racism stick, the...

Chad Henderson is the media’s poster boy for Obamacare. Reporters struggled this week to find individuals who said they had been able to enroll in one of the law’s 36 federally run health-insurance exchanges. That changed yesterday, when they found Henderson, a 21-year-old student and part-time child-care worker who lives in Georgia and says that he successfully enrolled himself and his father Bill in insurance plans via the online exchange administered at healthcare.gov. But in an exclusive phone interview this morning with Reason, Chad father's Bill contradicted virtually every major detail of the story the media can't get enough of....

Three days after its launch, the new health-insurance marketplace set up under the Affordable Care Act still was not working in the Milwaukee area and Wisconsin. "We have been having the same issues," Sarah Bailey, a spokeswoman for Progressive Community Health Centers, said Thursday. Federal officials continued to attribute the problems to the heavy volume of visitors to the healthcare.gov website. But that explanation has stirred skepticism. Robert Laszewski, a health policy consultant and former insurance executive, said he tried to access the website at 6 a.m. and at midnight. "What volume do they have at 6 a.m. and midnight?"...

Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog 83 reasons why Democrats and unions are turning againstÂ Obamacare 1) After Obamcare was passed, unions that supported its passage requested and received special exemptionsWithin months after Obamacare was passed, Obama gave some organizations an exemption from some of the requirements of Obamacare. As time went on, more than 1,300 organizations received these exemptions.More than half of the people who are covered by insurance plans that received these exemptions are in union insurance plans. These unions supported the passage of Obamacare. But immediately after Obamacare was passed, these unions wanted exemptions from the very same law...

If you have purchased health coverage on the federal government's new Obamacare marketplace, about a dozen or so reporters would like to speak with you. We promise we won't take up too much of your time! We just need to find you first. The federal government has said that somewhere out in this vast country of 313 million people, where 48 million lack insurance coverage, someone has managed to sign up for health insurance on the federally-run marketplaces. As of yet, we haven't tracked this person - or these people - down. This is not for lack of effort. Reporters...

President Obama faces a dual challenge in the months ahead: Convince uninsured Americans to sign up for Obamacare and keep worried Democrats on board as the administration enacts his health care overhaul. The rollout of the Obamacare health exchanges Oct. 1 touched off a high-stakes messaging battle over the president's signature legislative achievement, a clash with enormous repercussions for the 2014 midterm elections. Playing an expectations game, Obama’s surrogates have openly argued that it could take months, if not years, for Americans to fully appreciate the impact of a law that polls show has been greeted with confusion and skepticism....

Rep. Tim Huelskamp says that none of his fellow Kansans have been able to enroll in Obamacare due to widespread glitches and technical malfunctions. “My office recently spoke with one of the insurers in Kansas who told us that not one, not one, of the 365,000 uninsured Kansans successfully signed up for insurance on the Obamacare exchanges the first day,” Huelskamp, who himself tried and failed to enroll in the program on Tuesday, said on the House floor. Huelskamp described his struggles with the online system, and said he had still been on “hold” with the system for 60 hours.

October 3, 2013 Sebelius Fails even in Her Own State: Not a single Kansan Signs up for ObamaCare On the First DayWASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, the office of Congressman Tim Huelskamp revealed that according to one of the insurance providers in Kansas, none of the 356,000 uninsured Kansans successfully signed up for insurance on the much-hyped ObamaCare exchanges the first day. Congressman Tim Huelskamp has had his own troubles signing up in the exchanges. The Congressman has been on “hold” for over 60 hours, and is still waiting to sign up as required under ObamaCare.Congressman Huelskamp released this statement regarding the...

Over at Business Insider, Henry Blodget retells the story of Butch Matthews, a diehard Republican who tried Obamacare and liked it. The 61-year-old retired business owner from Arkansas was paying $1,069 per month for a catastrophic health plan. Now, he’s paying $0 for a very robust plan with only a $750 deductible......If Obamacare becomes the new home of elderly free-riders with lots of savings and no income who are just waiting to go on Medicare, then Republicans don’t need to shut down the government or do anything else to stop Obamacare — the program is completely doomed already....

Imagine that Jeff Bezos asked his vice-president for sales IT how many people had purchased products from Amazon the day before, and the veep said he'd get back to him "in a few weeks." How many nanoseconds do you think that hapless employee would last in his job? But on today's Morning Joe, there was the Obama admin's David Simas, sporting the lofty title of Deputy Senior Advisor for Communications and Strategy, smiling insouciantly while saying that it would be a "few weeks" before the Obama admin would say how many people had signed up for Obamacare. Conclusion: either: 1....

(snip) As we spoke about South Carolina's sign-up process, I realized I was explaining some unwelcome news: Yvonne is not eligible for any assistance toward buying health insurance. Let me try to explain: In a state that has chosen not to expand Medicaid, Yvonne is in the staggering position of now making too much money to qualify for Medicaid, and too little to obtain subsidies through the Affordable Care Act. This wasn't how it was supposed to go down for Yvonne and others like her all over the country. When you imagine the people likely to benefit the most from...

New Jersey next Friday will suspend enrollment in an insurance program for people with preexisting medical conditions mandated by the new federal health care law, officials said. The state was directed to do so by the federal Department of Health and Human Services, which received limited funding from Congress to provide coverage in each of the 50 states. Without the suspension, the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan would be in danger of running out of money to cover those currently enrolled, according to a message posted on the program’s website. “Those who have been considering purchasing health coverage … need to...

The Affordable Care Act is looking less and less affordable. Start with the IRS’s new estimate for what the cheapest family plan will cost by 2016: $20,000 a year to cover two adults and three kids. And that will only cover 60 percent of medical bills, so add hefty out-of-pocket costs, too. The next surprise is for parents who thought their kids would be covered by an employer. Sloppy wording in the law left that unclear until last week, when the IRS ruled that kids won’t be covered. Starting in 2014, the law will require employers with 50 or more...

In new, final regulations issued Wednesday, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) said that parents must pay a federal fine under Obamacare if their children or dependent spouses are uninsured for any part of the year. The regulations clarify provisions of Obamacare that seem to say that a parent will be held liable for Obamacare’s individual mandate penalty if they don’t have insurance coverage for their children. In its final regulations, the IRS states that parents will be made to pay the penalty if they can claim an uninsured child or spouse as a dependent, regardless of whether they actually claim...

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration adopted a strict definition of affordable health insurance on Wednesday that will deny federal financial assistance to millions of Americans with modest incomes who cannot afford family coverage offered by employers. In deciding whether an employer’s health plan is affordable, the Internal Revenue Service said it would look at the cost of coverage only for an individual employee, not for a family. Family coverage might be prohibitively expensive, but federal subsidies would not be available to help buy insurance for children in the family. The policy decision came in a final regulation interpreting ambiguous language...

In a final regulation issued Wednesday, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) assumed that under Obamacare the cheapest health insurance plan available in 2016 for a family will cost $20,000 for the year. Under Obamacare, Americans will be required to buy health insurance or pay a penalty to the IRS. The IRS's assumption that the cheapest plan for family of five will cost $20,000 per year is found in examples the IRS gives to help people understand how to calculate the penalty they will need to pay the government if they do not buy a mandated health plan. “The annual national...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Some families could get priced out of health insurance due to what's being called a glitch in President Barack Obama's overhaul law. IRS regulations issued Wednesday failed to fix the problem as liberal backers of the president's plan had hoped. As a result, some families that can't afford the employer coverage that they are offered on the job will not be able to get financial assistance from the government to buy private health insurance on their own. How many people will be affected is unclear. The Obama administration says its hands were tied by the way Congress...

Some families could get priced out of health insurance due to what's being called a glitch in President Barack Obama's overhaul law. IRS regulations issued Wednesday failed to fix the problem as liberal backers of the president's plan had hoped. As a result, some families that can't afford the employer coverage that they are offered on the job will not be able to get financial assistance from the government to buy private health insurance on their own. How many people will be affected is unclear. The Obama administration says its hands were tied by the way Congress wrote the law....